Engineering and Acquiring C4ISR Systems Based on SOA

摘要

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) policy guidance is driving a migration towards net-centric systems based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This migration to SOA and services based systems supports the ever-increasing demands for more agile C4ISR systems, more cost effective systems, and increased speed to capability. Individual programs of record are slowly starting to adopt elements of SOA, but little work has been done to identify the acquisition and system of system engineering challenges that a wholesale shift to SOA entails. This paper will identify he major engineering and acquisition challenges in moving to an all SOA solution and discuss potential solutions for many of these challenges. This paper will illustrate the challenges and potential solutions by examining real world examples from the development of key C4ISR systems - including GCCS-J, GCCS-I3, DCGS, NECC and CANES. Parallel trends in acquisition and engineering to explored include the move towards mission thread based requirements/testing and platform-level engineering.